With the 1980 release of The Golden Turkey Awards, the book by Harry and Michael Medved that celebrated the worst films ever made, there was a renewed interest in these beloved “so-bad-they’re good” films. In 1982, Paramount released the movie It Came from Hollywood, which offered a smorgasbord of clips from classic bad movies. And as home video became more prevalent in the 1980s, a lot of these films were released to VHS for viewers to (re)discover.
However, in the summer of 1986, one was offered a veritable crash course on those Grade Z movies that we love. Fox Television ran a series late on Saturday nights entitled The Canned Film Festival, which featured Saturday Night Live alumni Laraine Newman in a red, old-fashioned usher’s uniform (with the golden epaulettes) as a character whose mother (always unseen, in the projection booth) would run the Canned Film Theatre, which specialized in showing the worst of the worst. Each week, there would be a handful of geeky characters who would come to the cinema, and they would talk about the night’s movie.
Sample dialogue (on the night featuring Santa Claus Conquers the Martians featuring an adolescent Pia Zadora):
Geek: Pia Zadora? Does she take her clothes off?
Laraine: She’s only ten years old.
Geek: (shrugs) So?
That pretty much encapsulates the “humour” of this show. (Imagine that dialogue getting out of the gate today.) This series however was well-produced, with a beautiful, bright set recreating an old cinema. Its sponsor, Dr. Pepper, would rotate their same two ads during the commercial breaks. The ads’ futuristic cyberpunk settings certainly cost more than $1.98 (or for that matter, more than the entire production budget for one of the features they showed). But for all of this money, it is a shame that they didn’t put more into the writing, because the characterizations were at best paper-thin, and the humour was high-school level. The true humour in the program was in the movies they were presenting.
This show was also under fire by some die-hard film geeks because the films were always cut to fill in its 90-minute time slot. With the commercials and the “comic relief” interstitials with the recurring characters in the theatre, that meant that the films themselves barely ran an hour. The dinosaur footage from Robot Monster was gone, so too was the famous jukebox sequence from The Crawling Hand. But even so, kudos to the producers for showing some titles that are still hard to find. During its run, viewers were treated to such titles as: Ski Fever, Project Moonbase, Doctor of Doom, The Slime People, Rocket Attack USA, Bride of the Monster, and Untamed Women, among others.
Only 13 episodes of Canned Film Festival ever aired (in its fictional world, maybe the theatre closed down because it was only the same handful of people showing up). And despite that it was never repeated, I am amazed how well fellow film enthusiasts remember the show, if ever it comes up in discussion. Whatever misgivings one has about this progam, it is to be saluted for introducing some of these endearing B genre films to a mass audience.
Viewers in Western New York and Southern Ontario managed to catch Canned Film Festival on Buffalo’s beloved independent station WUTV, Channel 29, when WUTV became a Fox affiliate. (At the time, Fox’s programming was only late at night, so technically, they were still an independent station. By 1989, WUTV was fully absorbed by Fox.) Here are the air dates and titles for the films that played in this area (Saturday nights at 1AM):
June 21, 1986: Terror of Tinytown
June 28, 1986: pre-empted in our area for the March of Dimes Telethon*
July 5, 1986: Ski Fever
July 12, 1986: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
July 19, 1986: Robot Monster
July 26, 1986: The Crawling Hand
Aug. 2, 1986: Doctor of Doom*
Aug. 9, 1986: Untamed Women
Aug. 16, 1986: Bride of The Monster
Aug. 23, 1986: Las Vegas Hillbillys
Aug. 30, 1986: Project Moonbase
Sept. 6, 1986: Rocket Attack USA
Sept. 13, 1986: The Slime People**
*Note: most areas would have seen Doctor of Doom on June 28, however WUTV pre-empted it due to the March of Times Telethon. WUTV instead ran Doctor of Doom on August 2, although They Saved Hitler’s Brain was scheduled (and presumably that title ran in other areas).
** The Slime People aired at 11 PM instead of the usual 1 AM slot.
Originally published in slightly different form in Vol. 1, Issue #21, “A Tribute to Late Night Television”.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.